Professors and Editors may be the last line of defence against mechanical intelligence

June 13, 2026

Professors and Editors may be the last line of defence against mechanical intelligence

When researching and then writing a study on how the Cypriot media covered the war in Gaza, published by the Institute for Mass Media and Universitas Publications earlier this year¹, I toyed with the idea of including a ‘note for the record’ to state that the study had been free of any usage of MI.

No questions had been put to chat-bots, no request to identify, sort, summarize or, especially, create content, was asked of the machines. In the end I abandoned the note idea as superfluous, coupled by the concern that it might have been perceived as pompous. It was also dismissed because I have long favoured the term Mechanical Intelligence (MI) to the misleading AI, which would have meant having to explain the rationale in ways that would be self-referential and, in the end, distracting.

The study did not request of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformers to bundle readings and produce metrics or, as I frequently hear from devotees of the sport, to ‘take this text and make it better using my style’. Instead, it relied on the actual human reading of texts, watching hundreds of news bulletins and, importantly, taking notes when talking to journalists, academics and experts. The findings relied as much on recording and scrutinizing the reporting as on understanding the motives, dilemmas and tensions experienced by journalists when they were preparing it.

Terminology

MI is by far a more appropriate acronym than AI. The latter attributes a certain mystique to what is in fact a machine process: The word ‘artificial’ is deliberately camouflaged in a techno abstraction rendering it un-belonging and irresponsible. We say ‘artificial’ as if it is independent, otherworldly but if, instead, we used the term MI, we could begin to grasp that the machines physically exist, that they are actually located somewhere and, crucially, that they belong to someone.²

To paraphrase Ben Tarnoff³, calling it MI is the difference between seeing this ‘intelligence’ as an actual technology rather than a theology, and by consequence the owners of these operations as business people rather than high priests of a new religion. Indeed, business people who are dangerously ruthless having built their empires through unlawful data collection and exploitative methods, and remaining staunchly dismissive of regulatory oversight.

It is useful to remember that the overwhelming majority of people are neither technophobes nor technophiles. They neither dispute the beneficial dimension of MI nor do they underestimate the risks and social ramifications. Dazzled by what has become available, yet skeptical of the imposed sense of inevitability that has accompanied it, they have, nonetheless, succumbed to the stress of being left behind and have surrendered.

Students

None faster than students, though some, it seems, with a great deal of trepidation. There’s a lot of talk of professors of courses in which writing is important who are increasingly being handed papers that are inexplicably tidy and ‘too beautiful’, almost identical but mostly flat and ‘soulless’. An American professor quoted in the New Yorker recently said before all this “students used to work hard to come up with their own ideas. I’d help, and the’d struggle. But they’d come to something that was their own. That doesn’t happen anymore and I grieve that”⁴

Another, in an attempt to identify MI generated essays without having to resort to MI detectors, is applying pressure by randomly selecting students to read out their essays in class where “it was quite obvious that they hadn’t written them”.

Writing is inherently difficult. It has to be. ‘Easy’ has never been a goal in education. But it has become one at a time when universities, especially those that have capitulated to commercial imperatives and are themselves eager adopters of MI, are not willing to seriously stand in the way of its uncontrolled expansion. They prefer to be seen as trapped and unable to return to basics mostly because they are unwilling to do what is necessary to defend the idea of education.

So what type of students are they producing: Who are you really if as a student you submit an MI-generated assignment which you cannot even begin to explain when asked to defend it? Who are you –and what will you become– when in conversation you do not have the vocabulary to articulate the most basic premise hidden in the MI generated paragraphs that you’ve submitted as your own?

Perhaps we’re coming to the point where intelligence will be measured as one’s capacity to efficiently utilize MI, and that will be what universities will end up teaching. Will universities be necessary? Will MI complement intelligence or replace it?

The cases of students whose in-class experience exposes an empty shell so far removed from their slick submissions reflect the broader context of our collective dual-existence: the digital versus the real, the tension between the person you want to be seen to be when uploading your post on social media from the person you really are when you are sitting in front of a blank page. It is tempting to think that for a student whose digital existence is more essential than their offline existence, it might be effortless, indeed natural, to surrender themselves to the embrace of MI. Relationships with chat-bots are bridging an already blurry space between the real and the digital.

For the rest of us too, at a time when our capacity for attention is being tested by the infinite scroll, convinced as we have become that we no longer have the time to think, it is easier to opt for the machine, always available to spurt out with unthinking speed its accumulated data to help us save time. But save time for what, if not to be attentive to something as meaningful as thinking and elaborating one’s own thoughts?

Just like students, journalists are being caught in this pressure of efficiency and the temptation of convenience. To survive they have to endure a messy online existence under growing pressure from their media to produce more and faster copy. But unlike students, they know that MI is contaminated by malicious algorithmically-instigated disinformation and slop, and that submitting to that puts their intellectual integrity and professional credibility on the line.

At a time when public trust in the media is at such a low, surrendering to the machine to do the writing will prove the final blow for journalism. One hopes that just as some professors are resisting the tide and protecting their students, editors, even publishers, will do the same to protect their journalists.

Notes:

1. Media Coverage of Gaza – https://imme-universitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/MEDIA-and-GΑΖΑ-2026.pdf

2. AI in the Sky – https://nicholaskarides.home.blog/2021/06/

3. Frankestein’s Regrets – https://www.thenation.com/article/society/artificial-intelligence-ai-paradox/

4. https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/the-despair-of-the-professor-in-the-age-of-ai

Photo: Edward Hopper, Office in a Small City, 1953